by Ed McBain
“The Lord works for Solomon,” Cohen said. “The Lord does all these things only so Solomon can tell us about his Uncle Aaron in Bialystok.”
“In Belopol’ye,” Solomon said.
“Wherever, and don’t tell us again because it’s time we all went home.”
“In the rain?” Solomon asked incredulously.
“Better in the rain than your Uncle Aaron’s story again.”
“You want to hear it or not?” Solomon said. “Listen, if you don’t want to hear it, believe me, I won’t tell it.”
“We don’t want to hear it,” Horowitz said.
“Do you want to hear it or not?” Solomon asked.
“He said already no.”
“Because if you don’t want to hear it, I won’t tell it,” Solomon said.
“I already heard it,” Cohen said.
“True, but did the khoshever gast hear it?”
“Did you?” Cohen asked Mullaney.
“No,” Mullaney said, certain he had not.
“Perhaps he would care to hear the story?” Solomon said.
The men all turned to Mullaney. They wore entreating looks upon their faces, but none of their eyes pleaded so eloquently as Solomon’s behind his magnifying lenses.
“Yes,” Mullaney said gently, “I would like to hear about your uncle, Mr. Solomon.”
“Oi vei, he’s meshuge,” Horowitz said, and gulped his whiskey.
“It happened that my Uncle Aaron, he should rest in peace, was a no-good, always fooling around with women, cheating at cards, a regular gambler, anyway, which is forbidden in the Holy Book …”
“Where is it forbidden?” Cohen said.
“I don’t know where, but it’s forbidden, believe me. Otherwise there would be gambling houses in every Jewish ghetto, you think Jews don’t like to gamble?”
“I don’t like to gamble,” Horowitz said, shrugging, “and it happens I’m a Jew.”
“I once played a number, God forgive me,” Goldman said.
“Well, my Uncle Aaron, he wasn’t a once-upon-a-time numbers player because, first of all, in Russia they didn’t have the numbers racket like here in New York, and also he was a cardplayer and a horseplayer from when they used to run the races.”
“Where did they run the races?” Cohen asked.
“I don’t know where, but in Russia in 1912 they had a big racetrack like all over the world, what do you think it was an uncivilized nation?”
“I’m saying where did they have a racetrack?”
“The Czar had a racetrack.”
“Where?”
“In Moscow.”
“Where in Moscow?”
“I don’t know, I’ll look it up. If the rabbi was here, he could tell you because it happens he’s from Moscow himself.”
“The rabbi, it happens, is in Livingston Manor,” Cohen said.
“When he comes back, he’ll tell you where the racetrack was. Do you mind terribly, Cohen, if I continue with my story?”
“Please continue, I only heard it already a thousand times.”
“And a thousand times you made the same interruptions.”
“Forgive me, Solomon,” Cohen said, and executed an elaborate bow. “Forgive me, Melinsky,” he said to Mullaney, and made another bow.
“So my Uncle Aaron, on this fateful day in 1912, he had been playing a game of cards with a couple of merchants from the village …”
“Bialystok, it happens,” Cohen said, “is a big city.”
“It happens,” Solomon corrected, “that Bialystok is in Poland, whereas Belopol’ye is in Russia, and is a small village.”
“Belopol’ye, it also happens, is a big city.”
“We’ll ask the rov when he comes back from Livingston Manor.”
“We’ll ask him,” Cohen said.
“Anyway, my Uncle Aaron had been in a very large card game on Friday evening, continuing even until after the candles were lighted for the shabbes, and it was all over the village that the game was going on, but neither my uncle nor any of his friends would stop the game because very high stakes were involved. Melinsky, are you familiar with cardplaying?”
“A little,” Mullaney said.
“The stakes can get very high,” Solomon said.
“I know.”
“So this game my uncle is in, with its very high stakes, is continuing on and on into the night—midnight, one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock …”
“All right, already,” Horowitz said.
“… four o’clock,” Solomon continued, “five o’clock, still the game is going on, six o’clock …”
“Make it morning, please dear God,” Goldman said.
“… seven o’clock, and finally the game breaks up. So guess who’s the big winner?”
“Your Uncle Aaron,” Cohen said.
“Correct! And guess what he decides to do?”
“He decides to go to temple to thank the Lord for his good fortune.”
“Correct!” Solomon said. “The sun had been up for perhaps an hour and a half by then, it was a beautiful spring day, it was April in fact, oh the sun was shining brightly and the cocks were crowing and all the animals of the field were making sounds in the early morning, the village very quiet …”
“A big city!” Cohen complained.
“… and my uncle walking along the dusty road to the little temple, where are gathered for services several dozen old religious Jews like ourselves.”
“This part I heard already,” one of the men at the table said, and abruptly banged down his shot glass and walked toward the stairway.
“Mandel, wait!” Solomon called after him, but the man shook his head, and then made a shooing gesture with his palm flat and out toward Solomon, and quietly trudged up the steps. Solomon turned to Mullaney. His blue eyes behind their magnifying lenses were glowing with the pride of narration, the honest effort of building a story to a climax. Mullaney could hardly wait to hear what happened next. Solomon smoothed his trim white mustache under his nose, put a withered finger alongside his cheek and said, “The sun is shining bright, remember, when my uncle goes into the temple. He puts on a yarmoulke and a tallis—he is not carrying his own tallis-zeckl because this is the shabbes, and he is not permitted to carry anything, though his pockets are full of money that he won from the game …”
“Tsah!” Goldman said, and would have spit had he not been in the temple.
“Certainly,” Solomon said, “I told you he was an evil man, I didn’t tell you this from the beginning?”
“Still, to carry money on the shabbes,” Goldman said, and pulled a grimace, and touched the handkerchief knotted around his throat as if in affirmation. Mullaney suddenly realized that it was knotted there because he was not permitted to carry anything in his pockets today.
“Anyway, my uncle goes to put on the tallis,” Solomon said, “he is already saying the words, ‘Bless the Lord, Oh my Soul! Lord my God, thou art very great,’ and so on, when all of a sudden there comes a thing of lightning through the open window of the temple, it could blind you, and immediately afterwards there comes a boom of thunder like you never heard, and it starts raining. My uncle looks up and the lightning is still hanging there in the temple, it isn’t moving, it’s hanging just inside the window where it first came in, as if it’s waiting there until it finds who it came in for, farshtein? And who did it come in for? Well, my friends, in the next minute that lightning starts to move around the room, straight for my Uncle Aaron who’s gambling and fooling with women, who’s carrying money in his pockets on the shabbes, it chases him around that temple with the other Jews running to get out of his way, and finally it chases him right out the temple door into the street! And there, in plain sight of all the people of the village, in plain sight so that everyone can see in the eyes of God, bang! that lightning hits him right on the head and kills him, and all the money he won in the card game falls out of his pockets on the street! This is a true story, so help me God
, may I be struck down like my Uncle Aaron.”
“I don’t believe it,” Cohen said.
“It’s true,” Solomon said, nodding.
“I don’t believe it neither,” Horowitz said.
“I believe it,” Mullaney said fervently.
“You do?” Solomon asked, surprised.
“Yes. The exact same thing happened to my friend Feinstein.”
“The exact same thing?” Solomon asked, astonished.
“Yes. Well no, not the exact same thing. Actually, it happened in Las Vegas, outside the Sands, while Eddie Fisher was singing inside. But yes, Feinstein had been gambling all night, and he did get chased into the street, and he was struck by lightning. Though later, of course, there was speculation about what had really killed him, it being said a blackjack dealer had shot him with a .45 automatic. I, personally, have always believed he was struck by lightning, though witnesses claim Feinstein had been praying aloud for aces all night long, which could have caused the dealer to go berserk, I suppose, especially if he had no sense of humor or was not as pious a man as Feinstein.”
“Isadore Feinstein from Washington Heights?”
“No, Abraham Feinstein from the Grand Concourse.”
“I don’t think I know him,” Solomon said, and suddenly turned toward the stairwell.
The surprise was mutual and immediate, preceded only by the creaking of a stair tread, the single harbinger that caused Solomon to turn. The stairwell was behind the rear wall of the synagogue, and K and Purcell came around that wall cautiously, revolvers drawn, rather like bad imitations of television detectives raiding a numbers bank. Mullaney saw them at exactly the same time that they saw him, and all three men let out squeaks of surprise and almost leapt into the air, Mullaney in fear that he would be shot in the next instant, K and Purcell in delight at having found their quarry at last.
“There he is!” Purcell shouted—needlessly, Mullaney thought, since it was plain to see that there he was, and even plainer to see that there was no way out of this underground room save for the staircase which was now so effectively blocked.
Goldman, taking one look at the pistols in their hands, shouted, “Pogrom!” and all the other old men, cued by Goldman, remembering stories of atrocities in Russian and Polish villages, perhaps even remembering scenes from their own childhoods, began running around the room shouting, “Pogrom, pogrom!” coming between Mullaney and his two pursuers, who still stood near the stairwell uncertainly, the pistols ready in their hands, but not wanting to shoot a bunch of old men who were racing around the room holding their hands to their heads and their ears and shouting, “Pogrom, pogrom!” for the whole neighborhood to hear. Mullaney, who didn’t want anyone to get shot either, least of all himself, picked up one of the folding chairs and threw it at Purcell, missing, he had never been very good at hitting people with folding chairs. The old men stopped running in that moment, perhaps because they realized Mullaney was the intended victim and not themselves, a realization that provided immunity and therefore power, perhaps because they remembered all at once that it did no good to run, it was more important to stand and fight even if the victim was only a stranger who had enabled you to pray publicly on the sabbath. Solomon seized the lighted candelabra from the altar, and with a bloodcurdling shriek worthy of an Irgun warrior, rushed K and struck him on the arm, sending the gun skittering across the floor, and also sending candles flying in every direction—oh my God, Mullaney thought, we’re going to have a fire here.
“Run, Melinsky!” Solomon shouted. “Flee!”
But Mullaney could not run, would not run while candles were burning on the wooden floor. He began stamping them out, and saw that Purcell had turned from the stairway to level his gun at Solomon, who was bending over the fallen K now, ready to strike another blow, this time on the head perhaps. Cohen yelled, “Solomon, look out!” and then seized a whole handful of talliths from the rack and threw them over Purcell’s head, the shawls covering him as effectively as a net. Mullaney kept stamping on the candles. A pistol shot rang out, shattering the stained-glass window, Purcell firing blindly from beneath his entangling silk shawls.
“We’ve got the situation!” Solomon shouted. “Flee, Melinsky!”
“Thank you!” Mullaney said, or perhaps only thought, and fled.
He fled into a city washed clean by the rain, her streets black and shining and smelling sweet and fresh, the sun poking through the clouds now like a religious miracle, great radiating spikes of dazzling light piercing the overhead gloom, reflecting in curbside puddles. A barefooted little boy stamped his feet in the water and shrieked in glee as Mullaney ran past him, turning left onto First Avenue, running uptown because uptown was where the library was.
The cessation of the storm had summoned everyone outdoors to sit or stroll. There was a holiday mood on First Avenue, partially because it was the sabbath and partially because this was the dirtiest city in the world and everyone was delighted that a rainstorm had carried away some of its soot and grime. Besides, it was spring, and city rain never succeeds the way it does in the spring, when it carries the aroma of unseen green clear across the canyons from Central Park, wafting gently on each crisp new breeze, cool and excruciatingly sweet. You can breathe in New York in the spring, Mullaney thought, you can suck great gobs of air into your lungs, especially after it rains. The clouds were scattering now, the sun was breaking through completely, putting the grey to rout, turning the streets to glittering obsidian. He ran not because he thought he was being chased, but only because he was beginning to enjoy running, feeling very much the way Jean Paul Belmondo must have felt on the Champs Élysées. In fact, when he spotted an old lady in a flowered housedress standing on the corner, holding a shopping bag, he ran up to her and threw the hem of her housedress clear up over her pink bloomers, “Oh, dear!” the lady said, and stared after him in wonder as he raced on past. The jacket was waiting for him at the library. The secret was nestling on the floor of that dusty vault where he had made love to Merilee, the secret to untold wealth, some of which he would lay on Jawbone’s nose, oh what a lucky man I am, he thought, oh what a wonderfully lucky fellow to be running in this springtime city like Jesse Owens or Gunder Hägg.
But, being thirty-nine and very close to forty, he soon tired of all this springtime frivolity and, out of breath, panting hard, decided he had best try to rustle up twenty cents for a subway token that would take him to the library before he dropped dead of a heart attack right here on this lovely springtime street. He did not want to beg because it didn’t seem fitting for someone as nicely dressed as he was to go around begging on First Avenue; that would hardly seem proper for someone wearing clothes that had belonged to a person ten times the man he was, or so Melanie had claimed, and he had no reason to doubt her word. And, as much as he detested the idea of stealing, he justified the plan that sprang full-blown into his head by telling himself that as soon as he made his killing he would come back and return the money he was about to pilfer—well, not pilfer, but certainly con out of an unsuspecting sucker.
He carefully cased the avenue, picking out the most crowded luncheonette he could find, and taking a seat at the farthest end of the counter, away from the cash register. He ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and a Coke, figuring he might just as well eat while he was at it, being very hungry. He ate leisurely and unobtrusively, keeping his head bent most of the time, avoiding the waitress’s eye, and ascertaining what he had learned from his scrutiny of the place through the plate-glass window: that the cashier was a rather portly old gentleman wearing glasses and reading a copy of Sports Illustrated. When he finished his meal, he picked up the check the waitress had given him, walked toward the cashier, and then directly past the cashier and into the telephone booth. He lifted the receiver from the hook, pretended to deposit a dime, dialed Irene’s number because it was the first number that came to mind, and then carried on an imaginary conversation with her while watching the cashier.
The c
ash register was on the extreme right-hand end of a long, glass-enclosed cigar display case. The cashier sat behind it on a high stool, turning to his right whenever a patron came to pay a check, adding up the items on it, taking the money and making change, and then turning to his left to skewer the check on the spike of a bill spindle that rested on the counter top to the left of the register. He then invariably went back to reading his magazine, leaning against the wall behind him, and looking up again only when the next patron arrived. Mullaney carried on his imaginary conversation with Irene, biding his time, waiting for the proper moment.
The proper moment arrived when three diners walked up to the cash register simultaneously, ready to pay their checks. Mullaney immediately came out of the phone booth, walked quickly to the register, and stood slightly apart from the people gathered there. The cashier turned to his right, took the check from the first patron, and then bent his head to add the column of figures. Mullaney swiftly and daringly thrust out both hands and stuck his own check onto the bill spindle to the left of the register, piercing the green slip, and then glancing quickly at the cashier to see if he had noticed the sudden move. The cashier pushed some keys on his register, opened the cash drawer, made change for his customer, a fat lady in a flowered bonnet, and then turned to his left and skewered the check on the spindle, covering the check Mullaney had just placed there. The only person who seemed to have followed the action was a hawk-nosed man with a heavy beard shadow, who glanced at Mullaney, shrugged uncomprehendingly, and then turned away. Mullaney waited until everyone, especially the hawk-nosed man, had paid his bill and left the luncheonette. Standing expectantly and patiently by the register, he waited for the cashier to look up at him. The cashier was now leaning against the wall again, reading his Sports Illustrated. Mullaney cleared his throat.
“Yes?” the cashier said.
“May I have my change, please?” Mullaney said.
“What?” the cashier said, and looked up at him for the first time.